Account 1 - Entry 1

Account 1: Sunny Days. Written by Michael Eaton. Also Known as the Boyfriend.

Proximity to June Bloomer: too close.

Entry one:

Johnston’s creek, about half a mile away from Mossfield and secluded by junctions of spring water, was home to weather as erratic and spontaneous as its girls. Just as snow began to fall in little clusters of virgin white, it frosted the yellowed grass with a fine touch as sweet as it was short lived. People gathered to their windows glinting in night’s streetlights and breathing condensation to their windows. Taped to their walls were calendars flicked to April only two days ago. The swings haunted by teenagers and their bottles wrapped in brown paper were soon lined with the melted mixture by morning time. When alarm clocks and school bells ran out hours later, the snow had cleared and in place had left a basking summer sun that cleared all evidence of snowfall with a golden ease, as though it had never happened before.

The midnight case of snow was uncommonly common for Johnston’s creek, but like all other oddities in the town the citizens looked through their windows and never went out to face the cold first-hand. It didn’t seem to matter if the occurrence was pieces of frozen condensation, dropping through the sky, or in the form of a sixteen-and-a-half year old girl, who had somehow appeared amongst the mild madness as though she’d been moulded by precious little snowflakes herself.

If the story wasn’t clear to you already, this girl would be important. Little June Bloomer, of five feet and a handful of inches; the girl who would stand outside and stick out her pink tongue in the middle of a snow blizzard while we all stood watching. June Bloomer, of white-blonde hair and pale blue rain eyes, who would be known as looking like the morning mist that cast across Lake Dew. June Bloomer, who would break my heart above all other catastrophes held accountable for her paint-chipped and small hands. 

She was a girl like no other, but I guess you could say that about a lot of girls. It was hard to call each girl the same �" unless they were the Parkinson twins dressed identically in plaid shirts and pale dungarees throughout the seasons out of school hours, with an equal disinterest in life. I had dated four girls each with their differentiating quirks and annoyances. But all were beautiful and cruel and sweet and kind as one with the magic of multitasking girls were said to have. But none made an impact as important and scarring compared to that of June. 

We decided to write this for numerous reasons. Some are obvious; because June Bloomer is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to our town and because it’s hard to know what to believe when national reporters step onto land they otherwise didn’t even know existed until the moment they were assigned to a story they had no attachment to. In that sense we wanted to give a full account. But the words that describe the blood that raced in the white or her eyes, or the signs like a faded neon sticker to show us of the coming future seem to slur and stumble even now as I try to force them down on paper. June Bloomer cannot be written anymore than she can be understood from an outer perspective.

Nevertheless, I, Michael Eaton, vow to try. June Bloomer deserves more than the slanderous, printed blank ink of global papers and looks of disgusts from Johnston creek’s noisy neighbours. She deserves her pains and aches and sorrows to be felt with human sympathy, and not from therapist’s examining the evidence from a New York cosy office with statistics and nothing more.

Outside the window, months after her legacy burst like shifting mountains, we all gasp in a horror as hailstones bash against the glass and walls of a solid town foundation. The weather has been more of a mess than ever before. June Bloomer invaded our lives for the remains of a quiet spring, an electric summer, a feverish winter and by the time a full year had passed she was nothing but the roar of sirens and yellow tape.

The hailstones thud as they attempt to shatter the glass. We all know now that deep in the roots of Johnston’s creek there have been cracks well before the arrival of a certain girl.